U.S. RECLASSIFIES MANY DOCUMENTS IN SECRET REVIEW

Published: February 21, 2006

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But the historians say the program is removing material that can do no conceivable harm to national security. They say it is part of a marked trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush administration, which has increased the pace of classifying documents, slowed declassification and discouraged the release of some material under the Freedom of Information Act.

Experts on government secrecy believe the C.I.A. and other spy agencies, not the White House, are the driving force behind the reclassification program.

''I think it's driven by the individual agencies, which have bureaucratic sensitivities to protect,'' said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, editor of the online weekly Secrecy News. ''But it was clearly encouraged by the administration's overall embrace of secrecy.''

National Archives officials said the program had revoked access to 9,500 documents, more than 8,000 of them since President Bush took office. About 30 reviewers -- employees and contractors of the intelligence and defense agencies -- are at work each weekday at the archives complex in College Park, Md., the officials said.

Archives officials could not provide a cost for the program but said it was certainly in the millions of dollars, including more than $1 million to build and equip a secure room where the reviewers work.

Michael J. Kurtz, assistant archivist for record services, said the National Archives sought to expand public access to documents whenever possible but had no power over the reclassifications. ''The decisions agencies make are those agencies' decisions,'' Mr. Kurtz said.

Though the National Archives are not allowed to reveal which agencies are involved in the reclassification, one archivist said on condition of anonymity that the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency were major participants.

A spokesman for the C.I.A., Paul Gimigliano, said that the agency had released 26 million pages of documents to the National Archives since 1998 and that it was ''committed to the highest quality process'' for deciding what should be secret.

''Though the process typically works well, there will always be the anomaly, given the tremendous amount of material and multiple players involved,'' Mr. Gimigliano said.

A spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency said he was unable to comment on whether his agency was involved in the program.

Anna K. Nelson, a foreign policy historian at American University, said she and other researchers had been puzzled in recent years by the number of documentspulled from the archives with little explanation.

''I think this is a travesty,'' said Dr. Nelson, who said she believed that some reclassified material was in her files. ''I think the public is being deprived of what history is really about: facts.''

The document removals have not been reported to the Information Security Oversight Office, as the law has required for formal reclassifications since 2003.

The explanation, said Mr. Leonard, the head of the office, is a bureaucratic quirk. The intelligence agencies take the position that the reclassified documents were never properly declassified, even though they were reviewed, stamped ''declassified,'' freely given to researchers and even published, he said.

Thus, the agencies argue, the documents remain classified -- and pulling them from public access is not really reclassification.

Mr. Leonard said he believed that while that logic might seem strained, the agencies were technically correct. But he said the complaints about the secret program, which prompted his decision to conduct an audit, showed that the government's system for deciding what should be secret is deeply flawed.

''This is not a very efficient way of doing business,'' Mr. Leonard said. ''There's got to be a better way.''

Chart: ''Reclassified''
Some of the documents withdrawn from public access at the National Archives, under a secret program started in 1999, were already in the collections of historians, including Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian in Washington. Mr. Aid said many of the documents were just ''mundane,'' while some could be ''construed as embarrassing to the U.S. intelligence community.''

1950
A full-scale Chinese intervention in Korea was a ''possibility'' but not ''probable in 1950,'' an Oct. 12 C.I.A. memo proclaimed. Nearly 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea 15 days later on Oct. 27.